(5) Mon Mar 19 2012 08:39The Pitch!:
Hey, folks, Leonard here, telling you that if you haven't bought your copy of Constellation Games, still the greatest novel about video games from outer space, now is probably the single best time to buy.

Sure, you were skeptical at first. Ever since standing in line for that midnight showing of The Phantom Menace, you've been wary of things that seem awesome. You thought, "can this guy bring to comedic science fiction the same epic scope we saw in RESTful Web Services?" But now Part One of the novel has been sent to subscribers, and random commentary readers are calling it "STONE COLD BRILLIANT" and "some of the most fun I've had in years". Even normally reputable publications like Wired's GeekDad have called it a "wild ride" that's "so much fun to read".

Now here's where your late-adopterhood pays off: with the completion of Part One, all subscribers have been given access to a compiled PDF of the novel so far. That's about 50,000 words in a single unencumbered file you can drop onto your ebook reader or your fancy smartphone.

This means you can subscribe to CG for $5, read the first sixteen chapters in one huge gulp, and then start reading the rest of the story as the chapters come out every Tuesday. Or you can subscribe at the $20 level, read the PDF at a more leisurely pace, and finish the whole story when the paperback comes out next month. For $20 you'll also get three bonus stories that take place before/during/after the novel, and an irreverent guide to a pathologically strange alien language.

With all this stuff on the table, you silently think, why not keep waiting? Won't we just offer more in the future? THE ANSWER IS NO. Once the paperback comes out, the bonus stories and language guide stop being pack-ins and become "sold separately"s. The paperback on its own will cost $20. (I don't know exactly how this is going to happen, but that's the gist of it.) So the best deal is to shell out $20 now for early access to Part One and a lot of preorder bonuses. If you hate paper, you can pay $5, catch up on the novel the way you would a web comic, and buy the bonus material later.

Friend, don't let the fact that I seem to think it's a great idea to call you "friend" in a sales pitch, dissuade you from shelling out your hard-earned PayPal balance for this quality entertainment. Here's the subscription page, and here are the first two chapters so you can see what you're getting. The whole thing could be yours for the cost of a really, really enormous gumball, a gumball that won't fit in your mouth so why even bother? This is a much better deal.

(1) Mon Mar 19 2012 13:25Archive:
On Friday I decoded a BCDIC punchcard that my dad used to sign up for classes at UCLA in 1968. It says, "C 6088312496U40" What drove me to this? Well:

Friday's BCDIC adventure inspired by C.E. Mackenzie, "Coded Character Sets, History and Development" (1979), a book ½ boring and ½ AMAZING.

If I'm reading "About The Author" right, Charles Mackenzie was IBM's man on the committee that created ASCII.

In celebration of his great book, today I broadcast the best bits that can be summarized in 140 characters. Why limit it like this?

"How many readers of this book have experienced the aggravation of trying to squeeze 81 characters into an 80-column card?" (p269)

Because I laughed at that quote the first time I read it, then realized I had in fact experienced that aggravation.

spacehobo asked what those uncooperative IBM customers used the lozenge for. According to Mackenzie they used it to indicate "final totals as contrasted to subtotals" (p67) and to fill up blank spaces on printed checks. (I don't have a page reference for that one.)

spacehobo also provides some illumination on the Katakana problem: "kana are syllabic, so there's a received grid ordering for the characters that has lanthanide/actinide-style break-out areas"

Zack Weinberg complained: "All these struggles over what punctuation to include, but nobody suggests cutting back on the number of control characters. Nearly all of which are now useless."

Actually, lots of people wanted MORE control characters. Lowercase letters didn't get into the original ASCII because people wanted to reserve that space for control characters. I think they were imagining that as more types of technology were invented, control characters would have to be added to ASCII for each one. So by now ASCII would be full of modem commands and graphics primitives, but have no lowercase letters.

Why is "A" ASCII 0x41 instead of 0x40? "Ferranti had A as 1 instead of 0 so they could have NUL be 0 in a 5-bit code with mode shifts between alpha and digits."

Apropos @: "I really think @ is 0x40 because it is the most US-centric character so the easiest to do without in a 5-bit subset where it's NUL... But the major proposal that put @ there (Allen Whitman 4/2/1962) was arguing mostly for keyboard layout."

Why was ASCII not designed for use on punch cards? "They really expected computers to use a 6-bit subset subtracting 0x20, putting space at 0x00. 8-bit bytes came as a surprise."

Who says ↑ and ← were intended for ALGOL? "Oct 23 1961 draft refers to ↑ as 'Exponential' and ← as 'Is replaced by'." (The flowchart thing sounded fishy from the start--why 2 arrows instead of 4?)

Kragen Sitaker says: "They're also used in Smalltalk: ↑ is "return" and ← is :=". Dan Hirsch adds: "This is the reason that old smalltalk sources use _ as an assignment operator." spacehobo says: "I think I read in Jennings that := was meant to be ascii-art for ← once _ won out"